Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 9:08 pm Post subject: What is a service in a K-12 school?

Hey folks. I've passed my foundation exam, and I am working through service design now. I love it, but I'm at a point where I need to concretely identify services in my business. Could you please help me here?

External customers for schools are students and parents. Internal
customers are teachers, professional support staff, and administrators.

There are other services schools provide external customers like food
services, nursing services, after-school activities, etc, but the above
services are the big ones.

So if we look at the first major service schools offer, and try to find
some IT services we might try this:

mastery of a broad range of standards over a broad range of disciplines at a developmentally appropriate level

IT provides services to support students in mastering standards.
Most of the time, the services are discipline-based. For
example, IT provides tools and resources so students can learn,
practice, and work towards mastery of developmentally
appropriate mathematics skills. So that service is "tools and
resources to work towards mastery of a broad range of
standards". But is that a service or a tool?

The actual service IT provides is mostly supportive services, i.e. the computer, network , and access to software and web-based services.

I'm thinking about the TITL definition of a service:

A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes
customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and
risks.

So the customer's outcome is that their child learns (shows mastery of
standards). IT provides a wide range of tools (hardware and software) to
support that goal.